In a bizarre press conference ostensibly to announce a European Union trade deal, former U.S. president Donald Trump launched into one of his go-to renewable energy talking points. Wind turbines, Trump said, are a “con job.” They drive whales “loco.” They kill birds. And “what about the people?” When wind turbines go, “you can get death.” Hyperbolic as ever, Trump followed his riff with a few gestures before shaking hands with French president Emmanuel Macron and departing the stage.

Trump’s riff on wind power was a bit of a circus act, but it is far from a one-off soundbite. Conspiracy theories about renewable energy, especially wind, have bubbled up around the world for decades, often reflecting—and fueling—misinformation about wind power. A deeper dive reveals a pattern of culture wars concerns, often revolving around changes to power structures and social identities.

Trump, as so often, gets his facts wrong. He refers to wind turbines as “windmills.” The term has been somewhat popularized among climate deniers and right-wing communities in recent years, in large part because Trump. In fact, research shows that simply being exposed to words like “windmill” is enough to prime certain people into believing conspiracy theories about wind power.

His predictions of ecological and economic disaster aren’t new either. Moral panics about new technologies have accompanied every age of rapid innovation. In the 19th century, a common conspiracy was that telephones would cause people to catch diseases. The fear of wind turbines is similar, in that it represents a shift in cultural values and a threat to existing ways of life.

The claim that wind power and solar power pose a physical danger to humans, birds, and wildlife has been disproved time and again, and will likely be again in the future. Yet there is reason to believe that these concerns run far deeper than the usual spats about technology, and much harder to debunk. For one, they persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and they are notoriously difficult to dislodge with counterarguments once they’ve taken root in a person’s worldview.

For governments, corporations, and other entities trying to speed up the clean energy transition, that presents a problem. Countering misinformation is essential to winning the culture war over renewable energy, but if the conflict is about more than facts, tackling it will take more effort.

Opposition to Renewables Goes Deeper Than the Facts

Climate scientists have been warning since at least the 1950s that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could trigger catastrophic and relatively imminent environmental changes. But when it came to promoting renewables, early campaigns often focused on the opportunity to break the power of fossil fuel companies, as opposed to the climate or environmental risks.

One of the most famous examples can be found in The Simpsons, where archcapitalist Mr. Burns uses an enormous tower to block out the sun in Springfield, thereby forcing his neighbors to buy his nuclear energy. In the show, nuclear power is ultimately preferable to a fossil-fuelled future, but the joke was that fossil fuel companies and utilities would slow the development and adoption of renewables at every turn.

In fact, history shows those fears were well-founded. In 2004, the then–Australian Prime Minister John Howard appointed a team of fossil fuel executives to a group called the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. Rather than helping Australia rapidly decarbonize its economy, the group worked to ensure that renewable adoption would not be allowed to grow quickly enough to imperil coal, oil, and gas.

Public opinion of wind farms and other renewables has also been a long-standing problem. Unlike coal mines, oil fields, nuclear plants, and other energy sources, wind turbines are highly visible, often constructed along ridgelines and open plains where they are easily seen and audible to large swaths of the population. Those features have made wind a natural target for windfarm opponents.

In fact, one of the earliest “facts” about wind farms was that they make people sick. Allegations of “wind turbine syndrome,” a supposed illness that causes headaches, nausea, tinnitus, and other ailments, were widespread but eventually branded a “non-disease” by the World Health Organization after more than a decade of research into the topic.

Academic research bears this out as well. In one survey of 1,015 Germans conducted in 2014, lead author Kevin Winter and his colleagues found that conspiracy thinking was a much stronger predictor of opposition to wind farm projects than age, gender, education level, or political affiliation. Similar results have been found in more recent polling from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Respondents who believed in one type of conspiracy theory were much more likely to also believe that wind turbines posed environmental or health risks.

Fact-checking arguments like that ones doesn’t work. As Winter et al. concluded in their study, showing someone that wind farms do not poison groundwater or cause a mass blackout is a near-zero-effort change of opinion. That’s not because people are misinformed but because, for them, opposition to wind turbines is “rooted in people’s worldviews.”

The highly visible nature of wind turbines and the scale of large wind farms also make them a useful flashpoint. For people in favor of renewable energy, wind farms symbolize innovation, climate action, and progress. For opponents of wind power, wind farms represent loss of control, government overreach, or outdated technologies.

Yet beneath those beliefs lies a far larger, cultural struggle. Fossil fuels drove an age of unprecedented prosperity and cultural change. For many people, especially in wealthy countries, accepting the full environmental and ecological costs of that progress is a form of cultural and historical self-flagellation. In scholarly parlance, it’s known as “anti-reflexivity.” In practice, it includes Trump’s own rhetoric, often rooted in nostalgia for an age of coal, oil, and gas.